Search This Blog

Wednesday, 10 April 2013

My letter to Chris Davies - please write too....

I have smoked for 50 years. The more repressive smokers'
situations became the more determined I was never to stop smoking. You
could call me one of those un-co-operative stubborn smokers. In August
2011 I bought an electronic cigarette to use because I was going
somewhere I could not smoke. By October 2011, I had switched completely
to vaping only. I found I preferred vaping to smoking. It was quite a
miraculous event in my life. I think electronic cigarettes are amazing
inventions. They have changed many lives in an equally miraculous way.

They work as they are NOW. (they are regulated quite well in the
UK already as a consumer product, so saying they are unregulated is not
true.) If the EU meddle in what, currently, I would call the greatest
way to turn people away from smoking cigarettes, they will be
short-sighted and foolish indeed.

I have only vaped for 20 or so months, but there are some vapers
going into their 9th year of vaping. I have not heard of any negative
health conditions stemming from vaping, though we need another decade to
be sure. It is better, in that time, to offer smokers a way to lessen
physical harm, by using something that is definitely less harmful short
term and probably less harmful long term.

I very much doubt any young person who started vaping would ever
switch to smoking a real cigarette as the experience would be, in
comparison, quite awful. I would think smoking is the gateway to vaping
and not the other way around. I think, as the laws are now, and with plain
packaging immanent, young people will try smoking as a cool and
dangerous poke in the eye to authority and collect and swap the mind
violating images as a swagger.

In this circumstance, having electronic cigarettes as they are currently sold, as a consumer product, would save lives.

Electronic cigarettes are not sold as a quit smoking program. They
are for reducing harm so that smokers may still enjoy the ambiance, the
comradie and the joy of smoking, without inhaling poisons. They are a
substitute for smoking. The flavouring is offered to enrich the taste
and not to allure the young to try vaping.

I have found that the saying "Nicotine is what addicts people to
smoking" to be questionable, and I believe that is even being
investigated scientifically. Nicotine is as addictive as coffee - and as
harmful. There is something in the burning tobacco leaf that makes the
addiction - not the nicotine. Electronic cigarettes do not contain
tobacco in any way and should not even fall under The Tobacco Control
Directive.

As for the selling of electronic cigarettes - they are a consumer
product, not a medical device. They have been an amazing invention for
those smokers crushed between persecution and repressive legislation.
And they should be treated as a product like any other. They should be
avaliable to be sold anywhere.

If you need any information, there have been many scientific
studies done now on vaping and electronic cigarettes by vapers themselves
who are policing their own practices, please don't hesitate to converse
with me - or others who are far more knowledgeable.

There is a lot of mis-information and scaremongering coming from
those who might be fearful of vaping being the new smoking, or those
having vested interests in producing the mostly useless NRT Therapies or
even cigarettes!

Electronic cigarettes, so far, have been a grass roots thing,
controlled by no giant corporations, either drug, tobacco, or
Governmental. It would be a sad, sad thing, that they get interfered with
for whatever motive, fear, greed or control, to make them useless,
instead of the best Harm Reduction tool available - for smokers.